Bulletin Night

It is roughly 11 pm. I have just spent most of the last nine hours selecting hymns and working on church bulletins: thirteen of them, so we now have bulletin files for the next four Sundays, with Ash Wednesday and a Choral Evensong for good measure. The liturgical texts are in place, and all of the music except the prelude and postlude for 11:00 on March 16.

I won't go into the (very good) reasons why we need to get so far ahead, but I do want to note the problem with this approach. I get confused, and my work is not up to standard. I forget which service is at hand, and put the wrong music in the wrong place. Or the wrong liturgical text. Or I leave stray Alleluias hanging on into Lent.

The worst error (at least that I caught) was when I started with the March 9 bulletin for 11:00 to adapt it into March 16 (with some changes: on March 9 we do the Great Litany, on March 16 the Penitential Order and Trisagion). But I did not save it as a new file; I saved it right over the March 9 file. When I had completed the bulletin and could not find it as a March 16 file, I realized what I had done. Of course the bulletin I had overwritten (March 9) had a complicated structure with cut-and-paste music notation, etc. It took about a half-hour to re-create it, when all I wanted to do was to go home and go to bed.

Bulletins are perhaps the most time-consuming part of my work. Today was unusual, but this week I have spent more than twice as much time on bulletins and the liturgical decisions behind them as I have on the organ bench, including the playing of services.

I can only hope that today's work will somehow be to the glory of God. Right now, I don't see it.